Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a “widespread and ongoing” SMS phishing marketing campaign that is been concentrating on toll highway customers in america for monetary theft since mid-October 2024.
“The toll highway smishing assaults are being carried out by a number of financially motivated risk actors utilizing the smishing package developed by ‘Wang Duo Yu,'” Cisco Talos researchers Azim Khodjibaev, Chetan Raghuprasad, and Joey Chen assessed with average confidence.
The phishing campaigns, per the corporate, impersonate U.S. digital toll assortment techniques like E-ZPass, sending SMS messages and Apple iMessages to people throughout Washington, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Illinois, and Kansas about an unpaid toll and clicking on a faux hyperlink despatched within the chat.
It is value noting some facets of the toll phishing marketing campaign have been beforehand highlighted by safety journalist Brian Krebs in January 2025, with the exercise traced again to a China-based SMS phishing service known as Lighthouse that is marketed on Telegram.
Whereas Apple iMessage routinely disables hyperlinks in messages acquired from unknown senders, the smishing texts urge recipients to reply with “Y” as a way to activate the hyperlink – a tactic noticed in phishing kits like Darcula and Xiū gǒu.
Ought to the sufferer click on on the hyperlink and go to the area, they’re prompted to unravel a faux image-based CAPTCHA problem, after which they’re redirected to a faux E-ZPass web page (e.g., “ezp-va[.lcom” or “e-zpass[.]com-etcjr[.]xin”) the place they’re requested to enter their title and ZIP code to entry the invoice.
Targets are then requested to proceed additional to make the fee on one other fraudulent web page, at which level all of the entered private and monetary info is siphoned to the risk actors.
Talos famous that a number of risk actors are working the toll highway smishing campaigns by seemingly making use of a phishing package developed by Wang Duo Yu, and that it has noticed comparable smishing kits being utilized by one other Chinese language organized cybercrime group generally known as the Smishing Triad.
Apparently, Wang Duo Yu can also be alleged to be the creator of the phishing kits utilized by Smishing Triad, per safety researcher Grant Smith. “The creator is a present pc science scholar in China who’s utilizing the abilities he is studying to make a fairly penny on the facet,” Smith revealed in an intensive evaluation in August 2024.
Smishing Triad is understood for conducting large-scale smishing assaults concentrating on postal companies in at the least 121 nations, utilizing failed package deal supply lures to coax message recipients into clicking on bogus hyperlinks that request their private and monetary info underneath the guise of a supposed service payment for redelivery.
Moreover, risk actors utilizing these kits have tried to enroll victims’ card particulars right into a cell pockets, permitting them to additional money out their funds at scale utilizing a method generally known as Ghost Faucet.
The phishing kits have additionally been discovered to be backdoored in that the captured credit score/debit card info can also be exfiltrated to the creators, a method generally known as double theft.
“Wang Duo Yu has crafted and designed particular smishing kits and has been promoting entry to those kits on their Telegram channels,” Talos mentioned. “The kits can be found with totally different infrastructure choices, priced at US $50 every for a full-feature improvement, $30 every for proxy improvement (when the client has a private area and server), $20 every for model updates, and $20 for all different miscellaneous help.”
As of March 2025, the e-crime group is believed to have targeted their efforts on a brand new Lighthouse phishing package that is geared in the direction of harvesting credentials from banks and monetary organizations in Australia and the Asia-Pacific area, in line with Silent Push.
The risk actors additionally declare to have “300+ entrance desk employees worldwide” to help numerous facets of the fraud and cash-out schemes related to the phishing package.
“Smishing Triad can also be promoting its phishing kits to different maliciously aligned risk actors by way of Telegram and sure different channels,” the corporate mentioned. “These gross sales make it troublesome to attribute the kits to anybody subgroup, so the websites are presently all attributed right here underneath the Smishing Triad umbrella.”
In a report printed final month, PRODAFT revealed that Lighthouse shares tactical overlaps with phishing kits corresponding to Lucid and Darcula, and that it operates independently of the XinXin group, the cybercrime group behind the Lucid package. The Swiss cybersecurity firm is monitoring Wang Duo Yu (aka Lao Wang) as LARVA-241.
“An evaluation of assaults carried out utilizing the Lucid and Darcula panels revealed that Lighthouse (Lao Wang / Wang Duo Yu) shares important similarities with the XinXin group when it comes to concentrating on, touchdown pages, and area creation patterns,” PRODAFT famous.
Cybersecurity firm Resecurity, which was the primary to doc Smishing Triad in 2023 and has additionally been monitoring the rip-off toll campaigns, mentioned the smishing syndicate has used over 60,000 domains, making it difficult for Apple and Google to dam the fraudulent exercise in an efficient method.
“Utilizing underground bulk SMS companies allows cybercriminals to scale their operations, concentrating on tens of millions of customers concurrently,” Resecurity mentioned. “These companies enable attackers to effectively ship hundreds or tens of millions of fraudulent IM messages, concentrating on customers individually or teams of customers primarily based on particular demographics throughout numerous areas.”